The massive CityCenter complex on the Las Vegas Strip, set to open officially next week, is a blast from the very recent past. With a price tag of $8.5 billion, a roster of famous designers including Daniel Libeskind, Norman Foster, David Rockwell, Cesar Pelli and Rafael Vinoly and a staggering 18 million square feet of space inside six towers and a Strip-front shopping mall, the development is a fitting coda to the decade of celebrity architecture and overextended real-estate mania from which we've just emerged.If we now expect every major hotel-casino in Las Vegas to have a theme, the one that applies here isn't difficult to make out, despite the architects' collective attempt to scrub the project free of kitsch and historical ornament and coat it with a high-gloss, homogenous and faintly corporate sheen.
CityCenter's true theme is leverage. Ranking as the largest private development in American history, big enough to fill the tallest building in Los Angeles, the U.S. Bank Tower, roughly a dozen times over, the complex is a palace -- a series of connected palaces, actually -- for the age of towering debt and easy credit. They should have put Alan Greenspan's face on the poker chips.
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